Here are some some general guidelines on "reporting" versus "voting down" an article, as I too confused myself into a knot and I should know when to do it , so I am saying we all need help here...

Reporting can be very distressing for the member whose article disappears.

From our opinion "Advice" should only really be reported if it breaches the Terms of Service or the Code of Honor guidelines on the site. Examples include abusive language, negative suggestions against children, spam, non parenting related advice etc.

As a contrast, value judgements regarding the format and content of an article should be reflected in the voting of the article.

• For example if you find the article is too short, not of sufficient quality or not particularly about parenting then we would suggest members just vote it down by giving it very few stars in your rating;
  
  
• to improve on this it would be really great to mention the concerns as a "comment" to the member's article and suggest they move the article to "Q&A" or to a "blog" as it will probably not get great scores as a full article.
  

Having said all of this we accept that it can be confusing and that the site lacks a certain "order" to it where poor quality articles may continue to exist and detract from the excellent articles written by many members. It is a user controlled web-space however, and members may wish to report items for format or structure or short content, we can't stop this without substantial site changes.

Minti is less than a year old and we are learning all the time how to improve it, we will change the reporting and review system to make the above views clearer in the near future and I hope this helps members consider articles the use of the reporting button carefully.